In 1925, the publication of The City, edited by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, marked the arrival of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. “Community” has long been a central theme of this school. How should we comprehend and interpret “community”? 

Revisiting this classic text reveals that the concept of community can be understood across three fundamental dimensions: as an “entitative,” “processual,” and “everyday life” concept. This paper analyzes the co-governance modes of urban communities in megacities across three dimensions, drawing on field research in four Chinese megacities and their recent property management reform practices. The paper emphasizes understanding the fundamental connotation of Chinese urban communities within the context of integrated vertical and horizontal authority structures. 

Based on this, it introduces the “troika” governance framework that megacities are actively constructing under Party-building guidance, and further examines its governance mechanisms and practical logic from a meta-governance perspective. Finally, the paper argues that bringing “the school” back in—developing coherent theoretical schools of urban studies rooted in specific spatial and historical contexts—can revitalize urban scholarship, particularly as the frontier of urban research shifts from the Global North to megacities in the Global South.